Course Description:
After a short post-Cold War hiatus, nuclear weapons are returning to a salience in international security affairs that may soon rival that of the Cold War era. Russia and China have been “modernizing” their nuclear weapon arsenals for several years, and are behaving on the international scene in increasingly worrisome ways. The United States, after maintaining an essentially static strategic posture for twenty-five years, is beginning (and debating) its own modernization program. The geopolitical context in which we learned to manage the dangers and benefits of nuclear weapons during the Cold War no longer exists, and the new one is different and more complex. Nine nations have nuclear weapons, and further nuclear proliferation is latent in East Asia and the Middle East. Arms control seems to have reached a point of diminishing returns. What might the strategic future hold, and how should the United States attempt to navigate it?